Monthly Archive

Recently I have had the itch to play an actual Super Nintendo.  Why don’t I have my own SNES, you might wonder? Well I was a dumb idiot who left his SNES with a friend whom he lost contact with.  I lost the SNES, EarthBound and Secret of Mana notably.  EarthBound had a lot of sentimental value to me, but, I don’t care, it’s in the past, and this certain individual has left my proximity and I hadn’t felt the need to bring such matter up.  She wasn’t even a gamer.

So being without a SNES for the past 5 years I have grown to miss it.  Actually playing it on the physical hardware, yes.  Emulators are okay, I get a better sound system on emulator and save states and all that, but it’s not the same as on a clunkin’ mother fuckin’ TUBE TV.  Which is what I have, quite a large tube TV at that, something like 28″.  A few other things prompted me to ask my friend to borrow his SNES.

1. I’ve especially wanted to play an Illusion of Gaia cartridge I picked up a c0uple years back as an impulse buy.  I know I like the game, but I have never actually played this cart I purchased.  I had only rented it as a kid, as far as playing the actual cartridge… and beat it on emulator some years later.  I am excited for this.  I really love what Illusion of Gaia does.

2. He never plays his SNES.

3. He’s got a nice little collection of games that I can play through.  And I also have an old Actraiser PCB I want to play.

Yes, the PCB.  Because the cartridge was ran over after I fell off my bike as a youngin’– flinging the cartridge into the street where a car ran it over.  Hardcore, right? It chipped the cartridge casing but the game was fine.  Of course, it’s Nintendo hardware mother fucker.  The rental place wouldn’t take it back so they had my parents pay only $15-20 or so.  I thought it was a good deal considering it worked fine.  Curiously, I removed the PCB from the cartridge years later and found it set down in a closet in my house.  Now I’m dead set to jam this PCB into my SNES and get my Actraiser on.

Among the games I’m borrowing are Zelda 3, Star Fox, Super Castlevania IV, Super Metroid and Super R-Type.  I also have a copy of U.N. Squadron that I’ll no doubt be playing too.

This morning I played Super R-Type.  I set the difficulty to normal and noticed the difficulty difference from easy fairly quickly.  Normal is definitely has more of an arcade feel than easy.  Stage 1 and 2 I could manage well enough, game over’ing on the 2nd stage.  But stage 3 had a lot of stuff filling the screen and the slowdown was significant.  I credit fed to the boss of Stage 4 but couldn’t beat him.  One thing this game lacks is checkpoints, it has none, you start at the beginning of the stage if you die.  Pretty disappointing, but oh well.

The 4th stage boss was a gunwall and I had never reached him before.  I got to his 3rd phase but then was overwhelmed by the bouncing lazers.  I’m looking forward to seeing beyond stage 4.  Game has nice music and graphics.

I’ll continue to update on the games I play and my experiences.  ’Till then!